Bone Black
by Tripwire Alarm
Summary: A random vignette. "He's looking down at his hand as she's instructed, down at his hand being held up by hers. And he's supposed to be thinking about ratios and lead paint and charred bones but he's not."


"**Bone Black"**

She looks up from the table when he enters, face bright with that sideways, conspiratorial smile that creeps up on her when she knows she's smiling about the kind of something she shouldn't, but all the same she doesn't try to suppress it. "I've found probable cause of death."

How she looks is the same as usual, clear apron tied snug over a blah-colored blue labcoat, hair tied back, sensible shoes. And all the same, when he looks at her moving busily across the forensic platform to gather up her evidence, her long turquoise earrings bobbing from her earlobes as she moves her head around, pressing x-ray slides to the portable light table, it's the same feeling he always gets. He just can't quite describe it. A sort of lonely, cold serenity; like looking at a sunset or a black sky blazing with stars. Something far away and beautiful, something that would never love you the way you did it…though you would never expect it to.

She motions him over, clicking on the light table to illuminate the contrast in her x-rays of the cracked, toothless skull from the remains sent in from Georgetown.

"Okay," he prompts her, moving his rain spotted coat out of the way to plant his hands on his hips and lean over the images, the ugly winter chill from the rainy DC rush hour still clings to the hinges in his finger joints, reminding him subtly that he's not quite as young as he's used to being. "What are we lookin' at here?"

"X-rays," she says, as though that part isn't obvious, and doesn't catch his eyes flicking up to her in subdued and resigned annoyance. "Since prior examinations of the skeletal structure have indicated no evidence of violence—"

"Even though the skull is cracked like that? And the teeth—"

The sideways smile quirks up again, her eyes coming up from the slides to his for a moment before going back to the backlit images, where she points with her pinky finger to the imaged ridging along the broken wedge of bone. "Lack of perimortem staining along the fractures indicates the condition of the skull and subsequent breaks in the bone structure can be attributed to external forces _after_ death."

He always loves how her voice drops when she says things like that, letting him in on the trick, the secret. Even if it wasn't really a secret, the way she said it made it seem somehow just between them. "Okay?"

"So, ruling out basic trauma, we move on to internal examination of the osseous tissue. In this case, x-rays show massive amounts of lead throughout the cranial plates, particularly in this section on the parietal." Her pinky glides along the image, pointing out varying bands of dark and light that mean nothing to his eyes. Really, he finds her dainty pinky finger far more interesting than the black and white Rorschach-looking display of jagged shapes and contrast, but he parrots off the operative term in her explanation just to assure her he's listening. "Lead?"

"The half-life of lead in the human body is between 20 and 30 _years_, with 95 percent of the old lead residing in the skeletal structure. Finding these massive amounts of lead in the skull indicates lead exposure persisting over several years."

"Enough to kill?"

"Absolutely, in this case. This much lead in the compact bone could only be achieved by extremely high lead levels in the blood over long periods of time. Prodrome-onset symptoms would have been extremely obvious long before death." Once again, her eyes are on his, radiant, looking accomplished. He tries to ignore it as much as he can.

"But what all of this points to…is _not_ murder."

She cocks her head at him, detecting the genuine though thoroughly unintended disappointment in that statement. What she doesn't say is that she's not the only one who finds inappropriate pleasure in things that should not warrant it, just not for the simple cause and effect reasons. "Well…not necessarily. Clearly most people would not knowingly choose to subject themselves to enough lead to result in this degree of damage. It's possible the lead was being administered somehow. There are, however, instances of lead poisoning such as this in painters, many oil paints being extremely high in lead for color preservation."

"Artists?" He raises his eyebrow at her, forehead wrinkling up. "Just from touching paint?"

"Not only touching it, but by twisting the brush in their mouth." She mimics this movement, holding an imaginary paintbrush up to her lips and turning her wrist to demonstrate. "To get a finer point."

He makes a face, trying desperately not think too much about anything having to do with his partner's lovely pink mouth much less putting anything into it. "Disgusting," he remarks, though the word doesn't mix well with his thoughts, which have little to do with lead paint.

"Actually, many famous painters died as a result of lead poisoning from doing just that, twisting paint covered brushes in their mouths for various effects. Francisco Goya, Fortuny, Portinari, _Van Gogh…" _

Her eyebrows rise a little with her voice on the last name, and he knows she's stressing that one because even an idiot like him should know Van Gogh. He's used to that kind of thing from her. She doesn't mean it in an insulting way. He throws her a grin, making a slashing gesture beside his face. "Does that have something to do with him and the ear thing?"

"The mental processes do suffer," she says, nodding and gesturing with her gloved hands, her words inflecting every so often in that way she does, drawing certain words out longer and slower for emphasis. "Heavy metals in the body like lead or mercury interfere with the release of neurotransmitters in the brain, but the damage isn't limited to neurochemical problems. The central nervous system—"

He waves a hand around, as though to clear the air of smoke, brow furrowed up again. "Okay, though, wait…do painters still do all that? They still use lead paints?"

"Some. Oil painters mostly. Maybe we could talk to Angela about it."

He nods distractedly. "Identification of the body would help here…"

Now she makes a face, or rather it's just the triumphant sparkle dropping off so fast it's a wonder he doesn't hear it clatter to the floor. "The teeth having been removed is problematic in the absence of other determining factors. Is there any way to run a search of missing artists?"

"Only if it was occupation instead of vocation."

Her eyes go into soft focus, like she's looking at something far away; a familiar look he recognizes as her carefully formulating a response. "I am still reasonably suspicious that the postmortem removal of the teeth with a tool could indicate foul play. The metal particulates from the scrapings around the sockets suggested common pliers." She is saying this as encouragement, and he almost smiles.

"It's not like I _want_ it to be murder, you know."

Now she nods, switching off the light tray and tilting her head in the fluorescent light of the forensic platform, throwing him that same knowing look as before. "Well, I know you mean that in a personal way you wouldn't wish for this person to have suffered being murdered—but from an investigative standpoint—"

He doesn't let her finish; she's right, as usual, but it's not the point he was really trying to make anyway. It's not as though it isn't obvious _someone_ did not want the body easily identified. "Lead poisoning is going to be hard to make into a murder case. Especially with painters knowingly sticking brushes in their mouths covered in paint that's full of lead."

She smiles almost playfully at him, snapping the gloves off her hands, "Lead isn't the worst thing to go in some oil paints. The pigments themselves have origin in all sorts of…things someone might not otherwise want to put in their mouth, oftentimes those ingredients being the inspiration behind the color titles."

Blinking at her, he wonders how their conversations so often seem to shift into a seemingly innocuous subject that still conjures images in his brain he has to ruthless tamp down before they illicit unwanted physical responses. Sometimes this is harder than it sounds, especially when she's smiling at him with her blue eyes all bright like that. There's nothing better in the world than when she's happy. The few times he can recall her throwing back her head with laughter top the list of all the reasons why he can't seem to get her out of his brain anymore. Somewhere along the line, she's become the only woman in the world, perched up high on a pedestal of his own construction where he can never reach.

To add to the torture, often his unintended fantasies only consist of the most simple of intimate freedoms that he is not permitted, despite their closeness. To feel her heart beat, to smell her hair, to feel her hand clasped around his. To taste that sweet-smelling lipgloss she sometimes puts on in the car.

These things, they make him feel like _such_ a fool, this wanting of something so simple with such a painful, shameful intensity. She's speaking and he realizes he's been forgetting to listen, simply watching her expressions and gestures change as she explains, probably staring at her in a way he'd never expect her to even notice.

"…is iodine and mercury. Tyrian purple is made from clams. Paris green is pigmented with copper acetoarsenite, which is used as an _insecticide_. Egyptian brown was once made with ground bone ash and asphalt, purportedly from mummies, though that's unlikely to be true." She shrugs a little. "Bone black is made from charred bones."

He feels himself smiling, watching the glow on her face that always appears when she begins explaining random, usually unprompted torrents of facts. Sometimes he wonders how she can have room for all of that in her brain and still be able to remember her own name. "Charred bones, huh? That sounds a little more up your alley. Why is this sounding less like art and more like witchcraft?"

She knows he's joking. A few years ago, probably she wouldn't have. "Well, in a way because art is imbued with scientific principles. Art is really just science. Different aspects of physical beauty can be explained by geometry and chemistry. Take for an example, our anatomy. For the same geometrical reasons that make a piece of architecture attractive; the symmetry and balance and equidistance, similarly we find our bodies are built to ratios. The more perfect the _ratio_…"

"Wait…wait…the reason we find _architecture_ attractive…" Sometimes it's so hard following the direction her thoughts go into. Bones and architecture have a parallel in her brain that they just don't in his.

She doesn't wait. "The skeletal structure's length proportions are designed according to the golden mean. The golden section, the formula used by ancient sculptors for perfect proportion. The legs are 1.6 times longer than the torso, torso 1.6 times longer than the head. Look at your fingers," She reaches out, gripping his hand gently and bringing it up for him to look, and once again, his train of thought momentarily derails. "See," she says, a little more softly than she'd been speaking before, her eyes coming up to his briefly to check if he indeed does see, "how the first joint is longer than the second, then the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is called Phi, after the sculptor Phidias."

He's looking down at his hand as she's instructed, down at his hand being held up by hers. And he's supposed to be thinking about ratios and lead paint and charred bones but he's not. She doesn't drop his hand yet, still holding it up for his examination, so intent on imparting the facts she hasn't yet had the self conscious moment that would come so much more quickly to anyone else in the world; the moment where she realizes she's standing there holding his hand, standing close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body's chemical reactions burning oxygen and converting fuel into energy, the heat drying his rain pearled trench and soaking from his fingers into hers. He wants to tell her that sometimes breaking something intricate and beautiful down into understandable parts takes all the magic out of the world, but he doesn't. This happens often, him censoring himself…or maybe sparing himself the disappointment hearing her disagree.

Then, by way of distraction, she says "Oh," and her hand drops away. "Is it still raining?" she asks him, turning back to the table, her shoulder still pointed toward him.

"Eh," he shrugs, battling an irritating twinge of what feels, irrationally, a little like loss, "Yeah, not much. A little blow rain. Getting pretty windy." Then he shoves his perfectly golden-ratioed hands into his pockets and waits for her to turn back. Filling in the gap in conversation is the subliminal whine of the florescent lights set high above the platform, the mothwing tap of the soles of her shoes as she crosses back to the light-table for a folder. She's the only soul left in the lab, everyone else gone home to their lives while she studies lead content in bones on slides in the humming underwater silence.

"I'm starving." He says, and he is, pocketed hands clenching themselves up like nervous spiders, studying her ravenously while she isn't watching. "Are you going to be long?"

The way he says it doesn't leave room for pretending she isn't coming with him. Once, probably this would have bothered her. Now she half-turns and tilts her head at him, a thin lipped smile stretching her mouth. She doesn't say anything, only looks at him and he looks back. It is something they do. Wordlessly, she reaches behind her and tugs on the vinyl apron ties.

It is raining again after all when they roll out of the parking structure, the windshield wipers on the SUV swiping rhythmically back and forth, a metronome to guide the clattering raindrops in time. They pass the Blue Line station, a funereal river of black coats and umbrellas washing down into the tunnels for the nine-oh-five clatter along the black and steel stitchery underground. She tells him more about the chemistry of paint colors and why art is really just science, how every masterpiece is just bone ash and dirt and a thousand smudges put together some perfect way. He turns his eyes to her occasionally as she talks in the dashboard glow and passing flash of streetlights, gesturing with her hands and raising her eyebrows. He wants to ask her about the geometry of beauty again, about architecture and bone structure and why when you've fallen in love with someone theirs is the most beautiful of everything you've ever seen…but he doesn't. He doesn't need to hear about the release of chemicals and hormones, he doesn't want to reveal too much of his already laid-open heart, which is already in sufficient pain all on its own.

To her, everything is science: art is just science, beauty is an innate preference for symmetry representative of health and fertility, death either way by lead poisoning or lead pipe just a cold reality, a ceasing of function; the relentless slow burn of unrequited love and stomach-twisting jealousy just chemical cocktails for disaster.

She explains, and he listens, he comments wryly, he wishes and aches and bites his tongue. They have been a science for what seems now like such a long time. They have been art as geometry and the color bone black, just components put together in some perfect way that to her will always be simple and easily broken down into parts of an equation, never something unexplainably beautiful, like a pink winter sunrise or full moonlight mirroring up from still water and quietly, so she can't hear, he sighs.


End file.
